Another Kyoto by Alex Kerr

Author:Alex Kerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141988344
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

Looking Up Rather Than Down

Speaking of ceilings, since we’ve looked down at our feet, let’s look up at what is over our heads. Ceilings can tell us as much as floors about the purpose of a place. In Nijo Castle and Shugaku-in Detached Palace, which feature different levels of floors, the ceilings above them rise or fall in different levels as well. Usually, as the floor goes up, the ceiling goes up too. However, there are times when there is no change in floor level and only the ceilings vary. In any case, the ceiling is telling you who sits where.

In the oldest farmhouses there were no ceilings as such. They were open all the way to the thatch with exposed roof beams. That is still seen in the doma earthen areas. In Kyoto, doma kitchens are high and airy, soaring up to two- or three-story-high atrium-like spaces with big, naked roof beams above.

But those soaring big doma spaces are notoriously dark, as the dim rays from candles or lamps die out in the gloomy upper rafters. Plus, all the heat rises up to the roof, leaving the floor level freezing cold in the winter. So aside from doma, most rooms, even in farmhouses, have ceilings.

Ceilings in your normal Japanese-style house are usually thin planks that hang from a framework suspended from the rafters above. In grander places, you find a kind of coffered ceiling known as gotenjo, which grew up in palaces. Like so many things, I believe the idea came from China. A coffered ceiling is made up of slats of wood that crisscross, creating squares. Sunken into each square is a piece of wood. Reserved for nobles or shrines, coffered ceilings date back to the Heian period.

You can see an old form of it in the pavilions outside the main part of Kamigamo shrine. Some of the finest court-style architecture in Japan is there. The Emperor and the noble emissaries to the shrine would temporarily reside at these pavilions as they came and went. The pavilions were built with no walls but otherwise they are miniature palaces, and you can sense from these what a true ancient Japanese palace would have been.

Note that the ceilings at Kamigamo also arch upwards at the edges. This is called an oriage-tenjo, “upturned ceiling,” and adds even more cachet. At Nijo Castle, the entire ceiling of the main reception room is oriage-tenjo, but it divides into two sections: a lower ceiling over the area where visitors and attendants sat, and a higher one over the jodan-no-ma where the shogun held court.

Above the mats where the shogun sat, the ceiling rises yet again, creating a small third level. It’s a niju-oriage-gotenjo, a “double upturned coffered ceiling,” reserved only for a supreme lord.

The space between the lattices in gotenjo ceilings can be as large as fifty centimeters on each side. In Momoyama and Edo palaces, every flat surface was decorated, and so the coffers often got painted as well. Nijo Castle once had

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